Last year, Michael Shvo and Russian billionaire Vladislav Doronin agreed to pay $500 million for 20 floors of the Crown Building at 730 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of 57th Street. Now Shvo has filed plans to convert most of the 26-story office building into condominiums and a hotel.
The Art Deco skyscraper was constructed in 1921 by August Heckscher and designed by Warren and Wetmore. The architects were forced to revise their design after the city passed the 1916 zoning code, which required towers to set back as they got taller, wedding cake-style, in order to prevent them from blocking sunlight to narrow streets. When the building opened, Architectural Forum wrote, “the silhouette of the building is perhaps as attractive as that of any in the city with the exception of the Woolworth Tower.”
SCLE is handling the conversion plans, which call for 26 condominiums on the 11th through 26th floors. A five-story penthouse will occupy the castle-like crown. The units be spread across 117,950 square feet of residential space, for a typical unit measuring an impressive 4,536 square feet.
The first three floors will be devoted to retail and a hotel lobby. Doronin plans to install a New York outpost of his luxury hotel brand, Amanresorts International, in the tower. Hotel rooms will begin on the fourth floor and continue through the ninth story, for a total of 79 rooms. The seventh floor will host a pool, spa, “treatment rooms,” and lockers, and the eighth floor will have a gym. There will be a restaurant on the ninth floor, a lounge on the 10th, and hotel offices on the 11th floor. A second restaurant will fill part of the cellar.
GPP and Wharton Properties purchased the whole building for $1.775 billion in 2015. Then they agreed to sell 290,000 square feet of the 390,000-square-foot structure to Doronin and Shvo, but the sale has not yet hit public records. In September, Shvo turned himself into the Manhattan DA’s office on charges of evading more than a million dollars in taxes for purchasing art, according to The Real Deal.
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Filed to convert not new building, although outside not change but inside all new purposes. (and decoration)
This is one of the most beautiful buildings in NYC, don’t destroy his exteriors please, don’t add up any extra floors, it’s a real Art Deco gem. THE CROWN BUILDING, THE REAL CROWN ON 57TH STREET IN NEW YORK, AMERICA!!!!
Hope they renovate this builfing on manner of nearby Plaza Hotel!!! It’s a gem, a crown building, not so tall on modern supertall skyscrapers standard, but it was pretty tall in 1920s when it was built, when life was flourished up and America was still capitalist and great one!!!
All nuovo riches Russkie are mostly scammers and associated with mafia, due for unability to survive in modern Putin’s Socialist State.
Sorry but this a true!!! RUSSIAN BUSINESS AND RUSSIAN MAFIA LIKE A BROTHER AND SISTER IN MODERN RF!!!
Putin’s Russia is a modern socialist – fascist state, who posed a high risk for their neighbors including Baltic States and Ukraine, they forcibly annexed a Crimea from Independent Ukraine, and partially occupied a Donbass via separatist puppet “people’s republics of Donetzk and Lughansk”, with help of Putin’s puppet Chechens mercenaries… Shame on You, Russia, hands off from Ukraine, free Crimean peninsula, otherwise boycott your goods!!!
Another high risk developer this time dealing with Russian money launderers for destroy an architectural landmark in our New York City!!!!
It will make a most lovely tax shelter for the most privileged and tacky.